A Revised Revisiting of Gay Lib’s Origin

The date is June 28, 1969: the launching of New York City’s infamous Stonewall riots--and, as is generally regarded, the birth of the gay liberation movement. “I was an inadvertent participant--I was just walking by and got involved,” said playwright Doric Wilson, whose theatrical telling of the event, “Street Theater,” opens Sept. 14 at the West Coast Ensemble in Hollywood.

It’s a new version for Wilson, 50, who kids that his 30-play oeuvre makes him one of the country’s “best-known unknown playwrights.”

The 14-character piece, which takes place on the Christopher Street sidewalk outside the Stonewall bar, concentrates on the action leading up to the riot--when a group of men in drag resisted police attempts to raid the bar.

“The Stonewall was the tackiest bar in New York,” said Wilson, a transplanted New Yorker who also teaches a playwriting workshop at the West Coast Ensemble. “Drag queens were persona non grata at gay bars then, but the Stonewall was so wretched it allowed them in.”

The other characters include “a new kid in town, a closet type and an undercover vice cop--the pedestrians of Christopher Street. It wasn’t the ‘Boys in the Band’ Michael-and-Donalds who’d griped for years but not done anything,” Wilson said.

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This marks the third time that Wilson has staged “Street Theater.” He estimates that it has been done around the country 40 to 50 times.

“Even in rotten productions, it’s gotten a good response,” he said cheerfully. “But I’ve never been satisfied. I’ve never been happy with the last third of the play.”

With the recent revisions for this staging, he said, comes a sense of the joyousness of the event: “It needs to go a step beyond anger. The surprise of that night was that a group of people who thought they’d never have pride in themselves were finally doing something. The photos show them laughing, the joy of it.”

The value of revisiting that 20-year-old experience today?

“People were appropriating the story,” Wilson said. “I wanted to tell my account. It’s also to remind people that we’re still here, that--even in the specter of AIDS--we’ve survived worse things. For the straight community, it’s a very funny play. For the gay community, it’s a positive statement, which I think is quite welcome now.”

Also this month:

* Tuesday: “A Talent to Amuse,” a three-person musical revue featuring the works of Noel Coward and Cole Porter, opens at the Back Alley in Van Nuys. Directing is Rick Roemer (“Bittersuite”).

* Thursday: Kathleen Tolan’s “Big Chill”-style reunion story, “A Weekend Near Madison,” the premiere production of the Fountainhead Theatre Company, opens at the Powerhouse in Santa Monica. Andy Fickman directs.

* Friday: Family life in a Boron trailer is the seriocomic setting of Thomas Strelich’s “Neon Psalms,” opening at Theatre West in Studio City. Andy Griggs directs.

* Sept. 10: Leslie Caveny’s comedic tribute to obsessive and one-sided passion, “Love of a Pig,” reopens at Studio West after a smash run earlier this summer.

* Sept. 10: A single performance of “Time Flies When You’re Alive,” actor Paul Linke’s monologue about the life and death of his wife Francesca, plays at Topanga’s Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.

* Sept. 12: Debbie Reynolds and Harve Presnell star in a new road production of the Meredith Willson/Richard Morris musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” playing at the Pantages in Hollywood.

* Sept. 14: The background is summer stock in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” at the Gnu in North Hollywood. Jeff Seymour directs. Gary Frank and Bruce Kirby star.

* Sept. 16: Playwright Doris Baizley (“Mrs. California”) remembers the late ‘60s--and sending her sweetheart off to Vietnam--in the world premiere of “My Rebel,” opening at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood. Evelyn Purcell directs.

* Sept. 17: Lawrence Neal Moss’ “Babylon’s Children,” a dark comedy about Hollywood hopefuls, opens at Sherman Oaks’ Whitefire Theatre. Moss directs.

* Sept. 20: The popular Canadian troupe Cirque du Soleil returns to the Santa Monica Pier, boasting half a dozen new acts--plus return appearances by clown Benny Le Grand and the balancing act by Eric Varelas and Amelie Demay.

* Sept. 29: “Sisyphus and Albert,” Lawrence O’Sullivan’s new comedy based on a hypothetical meeting between writer Albert Camus and the mythical Sisyphus, opens at the Off-Ramp Theatre in Hollywood.